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Lately, I’ve been feeling guilty about not blogging as frequently as I should. Ironically, school administrator and keynote speaker George Couros, one of our field’s best known educational bloggers, wrote his post Isolation is now a choice educators make as part of his personal blog, “The Principal of Change”. In this piece, he featured a post I had written for Connected Principals entitled 5 Reasons Educators Should Have Blogs. As leadership guru MIchael Hyatt often recommends, it’s important to blog at least twice a week in order to keep readers interested and motivated to visit. Alas, while I have well over 200 notes tagged “blog” in my Evernote library, most of those containing ideas for posts, I need to be much more inspired to write regularly. Here are some ideas to motivate myself to find more time to blog:
1. Schedule a regular time to write.
Once a life action becomes routine, it happens without thought. While I don’t need any device to remember to brush my teeth or drive to work, I do use the powerful productivity system OmniFocus to remind myself to blog. I may also use my favorite reminders app on the iPhone called Due which will buzz me to write on a regular schedule.
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2. Utilize blogging software to make it all easier.
Here’s my system:
- I begin by logging blog ideas in Evernote. Being an bit of an Evernote geek, I can use my iPhone to jot thoughts using QuickEver or Drafts and then when I’m back at my MacBook Air, it’s waiting for me in my Evernote client program.
- If the blog post requires a fair amount of research, I use Scrivener, a muscular writing program that helps organize a blogger’s resources.
- Once the post is nearly complete, I utilize MarsEdit, a clever blogging program that allows me to arrange graphics, see just what the post will look like when it’s uploaded, and then easily posts to WordPress.
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3. Be open to blogging ideas whenever they may occur.
I don’t have any issue generating ideas for blogs but I talk to many educators who do. As mentioned above, having your smartphone handy (or even a legal pad) will quickly allow you to have more ideas for posts than the time to write them. It’s important to be open to the ordinary events in life that can easily segue into posts.
4. Trade time to blog.
Blog posts often originate from professional reading. Why not trade a bit of your reading time for blogging? Of course, most of us could trade a couple hours a week that we normally utilize watching a show on Netflix and use that time for blogging. You may find the same level of relaxation in writing that you do from watching TV.
We will find the time to blog when we are professionally or personally gratified by the process of writing. It doesn’t hurt if our readers comment on our posts and begin the cycle of collaboration.
Do you have strategies to help you collect time to blog? Please add to my brief list.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
